


Personal Items

by gendzl



Category: The Martian - All Media Types
Genre: Arts & Crafts, Childhood Nostalgia, Chris & Beth are BFFs, Fluff and Angst, Jewish Character, M/M, Second Chances, Time Skips & Flashbacks, the whole fic is just....stuffed animals as a plot device
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:34:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22326406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendzl/pseuds/gendzl
Summary: Eleven hours after he pronounced Mark Watney dead, Chris Beck snuck into his quarters onHermesand stole Mark's stuffed lamb right off his bed.
Relationships: Chris Beck & Beth Johanssen, Chris Beck/Mark Watney
Comments: 19
Kudos: 162





	Personal Items

**Author's Note:**

> I think this is the softest thing I've ever written.
> 
> The _italics_ are flashbacks to moments pre-Sol-6-incident. Regular text is all current time/post-Sol-6-incident. Mega big time jumps for "current time" until the end.

Eleven hours after he pronounced Mark Watney dead, Chris Beck snuck into his quarters on _Hermes_ and stole Mark's stuffed lamb right off his bed.

* * *

_"Aw, who's this little dude?" Chris asked, reaching across Mark to flick at the floppy ear of a large, off-white stuffed lamb nestled amongst his bedding._

_Mark grabbed it and passed it over to Chris. "Her name is Woolie."_

_Chris grinned down at Woolie and squished her torso gently in his hands. She had gone floppy with age. "How long have you had her?"_

_"Since my mom was pregnant with me. She bought Woolie as soon as she found out." His smile had gone soft around the edges, and he let out a small laugh as he added, "We had to vacuum pack her to get her to fit."_

_"Cute." Chris passed her back over to Mark, who immediately tucked her in beneath his bedding. Chris' heart clenched at the sight._

* * *

Beth found Chris in sickbay (not the room's technical name, but just _you_ try to get a group of nerdy space travelers to call it anything else), slumped on his wheelie doctor's stool with Woolie clasped tightly to his chest. He was staring blankly at the final readout of Mark's biometrics.

He knew this wasn't healthy. He was doing it anyway.

"You never told him?" she asked.

"I didn't _know_ ," he said, brokenly.

* * *

_"I had a toad," Chris said three days later, apropos of nothing. He was keeping Mark company in the botany labs, lending a hand with the finicky irrigation system he'd set up._

_"Huh?" Mark looked up, swiping a hand over his forehead and leaving a faint streak of dirt behind._

_"My stuffed animal as a kid. He was a toad."_

_"Oh!" Mark turned to look back down at his project, asking, "And what was his name?"_

_Chris hadn't thought this through. "Uhm. Toad."_

_"As in Frog and –?" Mark asked lightly, smiling a bit as he adjusted the water lines running through the bottom of the container in front of him._

_"Yeah." Chris handed him another thin tube when he motioned for it._

_"Thanks," he said absently. "I loved those books growing up; they were really sweet. I always thought the two of them were in love."_

_Chris shrugged. "The author was gay, so it's not much of a leap."_

_"Ha! Leap. Funny." He twisted two parts together with some visible effort. "Really, he was gay?"  
_

_Chris hummed in confirmation._

_"So, what happened to him?"_

_"To the author, or to Toad?"_

_Mark rolled his eyes. "Toad."_

_"I gave him to my sister when I turned 12. My mom_ still _sleeps with her teddy bear, so I don't know how I got it into my head that it was childish to keep Toad, but I did. She lost him when she went off to college. Felt so bad about it she cried on me."_

_Mark started frowning down at the tubing in his hands, so Chris turned the knob on the spigot near his hip, squirting ice cold water right in his face._

* * *

Mark was alive. He was alive, and NASA _hadn't told them_ , and Chris had been the one to pronounce him dead, and they had only left Mars on his word, and, and, and _Mark was alive_.

He didn't sleep at all that night.

* * *

_"I don't suppose we have a small fish bowl on board, do we?"_

_Martinez eyed Mark suspiciously. "No?"_

_"Okay. Thanks anyway."_

_Rick paused, considering, and then said, "Ask Vogel. He might have a beaker or something." He sounded exasperated with him, and Mark hadn't even said what he needed it for._

_Which was pretty fair, all things considered._

_"Cool." Mark left, and then poked his head back in a moment later. "How about a sewing kit?"_

_Rick pulled a drawer open without looking, reached in, and held out a box._

_"…Thanks."_

"Never _tell me what you're doing with that."_

_Mark saluted lazily and left for good._

* * *

They were going back to Mars.

* * *

_Mark presented a haphazardly wrapped gift to Chris, wearing the brightest smile Chris had ever seen. "Happy birthday."_

_It was a frog. A soft green head with bulging cheeks and bright black eyes was tucked inside—he tapped it with a fingernail and it_ tinged _, so—a glass bowl of some sort (fish bowl? No, couldn't be, they didn't have any fish). The body was crudely shaped, but the seams were neat enough that no stuffing peeked out between the stitches._

_It was utterly adorable._

_"He's wearing the frog version of an EVA suit," Mark said, grinning._

_"Oh, is that what that is?" Chris teased, straightening the glass bulb on the frog's shoulders. "And what did it start its life as?"_

_"A boiling flask," Vogel piped up dryly._

_"One of my t-shirts was also sacrificed for the cause," Beth added._

_"I called in a lot of favors for him." Mark shrugged, like it was that easy. "He's no Toad, but—"_

_"Of course he's not Toad," Chris said. "He's Frog, and he's perfect."_

_He dragged Mark forward into a hug and Mark's smile turned blinding._

_In an effort to distract everyone (including himself) from his mounting emotions, Chris disentangled himself to lean down and snag the improvised wrapping paper off the floor, taking a closer look at the reverse side. "Is this our itinerary?"_

_"That might possibly be the duty rosters from our first four months on board, yes." Lewis groaned, and Mark said defensively, "What? It's not like we don't have a copy on the ship's computer. We weren't using it anymore! Reduce, reuse, recycle!"_

_Chris tucked Frog securely under his arm and attributed the feeling in his chest to acid reflux._

* * *

When Chris hauled Mark safely into _Hermes_ , he became a litany of thanks. His hands were moving on instinct while his mind was nothing but a skipping record— _baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem, baruch Hashem—_

And then their helmets clicked off and the world righted itself. He ignored the stench of unwashed skin in favor of prodding Mark gently toward sickbay.

Mark was home.

* * *

Okay, so maybe not _home_ home. But Mark was within arm's reach (morphine's reach, X-ray's reach, _actual proper medical care's reach)_ which Chris deemed good enough for the time being.

After the initial flurry of activity was over—after Mark had shifted into blissful unconsciousness and Chris (and everyone on the ground at NASA) had made certain that Mark wouldn't keel over the moment he took his hands off of him—Beth knocked perfunctorily on the wall beside the entrance to sickbay.

"I thought you two might like some extra comfort," she said, placing Frog and Woolie on the small shelf set into the wall beside what would charitably be termed Mark's "bed". (It was a cot. A cot NASA had patented, sure, but it was still nothing but a cot.)

Chris dredged up a tired smile and thanked her.

* * *

When Chris glanced over at the cubby the next morning, one of Frog's spindly arms had been slung over Woolie's shoulders.

The morning after that, Frog's head was leaning on Woolie's shoulder, his glass helmet set safely off to one side.

"This is a really weird way to have a conversation," Chris said on the third day, gesturing toward their animal companions (they were in the same position as yesterday, with the addition of handholding).

Mark was in better shape than they'd expected. He'd even managed a proper shower that morning (albeit with a lot of help), getting the last of the stale smell off of his body that even multiple sponge baths simply hadn't been able to eradicate. His ribs were stabilized, and the Gs he'd pulled getting off Mars had been kinder to his body than they (by all counts) should have been. His teeth weren't great, and his gums were worse, but neither was life-threatening. The hardest parts of his recovery were going to be dealing with the after-effects of his enforced starvation, and his drastically reduced bone density. Chris would probably have to—

Mark's voice interrupted the train of thought Chris had been wearing a rut in since he slapped eyes on him. "Oh, so we're going to talk about it?"

"Did you not want to?"

"I didn't think _you'd_ want to," he retorted.

Chris sighed up at the ceiling. _L-rd, give me strength._ "It's fine. We can talk."

Silence.

"I don't know how to start," Mark confessed. "549 Sols spent talking to myself, and I can't figure out how to talk to you about this. Hence the nonverbals." He indicated the shelf.

His fingers were twitching in his lap again, like he wanted to reach out but couldn't figure out how. It was already a familiar sight, and so Chris snagged his stool with one foot and wheeled it over to sit down beside Mark's cot. He rested his chin in one palm and twined the fingers of his free hand around Mark's. (Touch-starved didn't even _begin_ to cover it. Whenever Chris thought about it for too long, he cried. So instead of thinking about it, he just…pretty much hadn't stopped touching Mark since they'd gotten him back.)

"It can wait," he said seriously. "You've got a long road ahead of you. You'll be recovering physically for most of the trip back, and you'll have arguably more difficult adjustments once we get back to Earth. And you _know_ NASA will make you run the gamut, triple-checking the results of everything I'm doing here, and getting specialists to you in person rather than using me as a proxy. And none of this is taking into account the PTSD and emotional side of things. I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to add whatever _this_ is to the list of crap you're going to be dealing with. You can put it off. I'd—" he snapped his mouth shut.

Mark eyed him cautiously. "You'd?"

"I'd wait," he admitted. "I would wait. And not just because we're currently trapped on a ship and I have no other options. I'd _wait_." He stressed the last word so hard his voice cracked. He studiously ignored it.

"Oh."

He rubbed a hand down his face and huffed out a laugh. "Yeah. _Oh_."

"I thought—I mean, I knew you liked me, and weren't completely turned off by the prospect of all of this—" he gestured with a vague motion that somehow encompassed his entire situation. "But that's…"

"Yeah."

"That's different."

"Yes."

"You _love_ me."

"I love you." Chris shrugged, like it was that easy.

And maybe it was.

* * *

Almost two years after Mark Watney rocketed his way off Mars in a glorified tin can, he proposed to the love of his life in the bed that they shared, both of them sleep-rumpled, neither of them wearing pants, and two stuffed animals the only witnesses.


End file.
